Hi to all forum members. I'm having big problems with my PC but now I'm trying to determine if the HDDs are going to die. Long story short my PC has many restarts, freezes, cashes and BSODs. Before those the HDDs looked fine. But now, from the attached photo I don't know how bad is the situation. I'm going to resolve the problem but what about my HDDs (for example the one in the picture) ?

Hi,
one place to look is the capacitors of your mainboard. Look at the largest capacitors usually located near the CPU. If they are bulging upward or leaking, this is a major contribution to system unstableness.

If you don't know what to look for, google images for bad mainboard capacitors.

Another cause can be corrupt windows files, or video drivers.

Finally a bad power supply can cause this as well. Yes also bad hard drives can be a cause, but usually windows will report IO errors or issues with disks.

I would suggest in this order:

1. copy off and backup all important DATA
2. check the capacitors
3. swap RAM chips to rule them out that these are bad.
4. re-install windows after formatting(meaning not to install windows "over the top" but fresh)

if problems persist, then troubleshoot further by swapping video cards, RAM etc and googling any errors reported by windows event viewer.

Hope this helps.

@ionescu.liviu,


There are many possible causes, some of which have been kindly listed by HaQue. It is not possible to diagnose the exact cause just from those symptoms you have listed, as they can have many causes (most possibilities are not caused by the drives) - normal PC & Windows troubleshooting techniques should be applied (these are off-topic for this forum, but again HaQue has kindly listed some).


What exactly do you mean by "looked fine"? How did they "look" different to the way that they "look" now? Do you have some specific data of how the drives "looked", for comparison between "before" and "now"? When did your problems start, and what changed before that? Why are you looking at the drives instead of elsewhere in the PC - do you have a specific reason to be suspicious of the drives, due to some evidence which you have not yet explained?


I see no obvious problem in the SMART data for that Seagate drive (although that can never prove that the drive is OK). However there seems to be another (Samsung) drive in your PC, for which you have not supplied any SMART data, so it is impossible to comment about that one.

Sorry for the late reply. So, the Seagate HDD is a month old and already at 59% health ? Next week I'm changing the psu, motherboard and ram with much better and stable ones. The other HDD is from another PC, but I have attached the other 2 (personal) here:













Some days ago, MAXTOR's state was critical (active disk monitor) but now seems fine (why?!). The SEAGATE is new and has more problems than my WD HDD (also in active disk monitor).
So my questions are:

1. Are any of the HDDs in danger ? (active disk monitor says yes)
2. I have a LOTS of power ups/downs of my PC (restarting, shutting down etc...). Isn't this affecting my HDDs ?!
3. Can you recommend any other software for testing my HDDs ?

Thanks for the other replies.

http://hddguru.com/software/
MHDD

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Flaky system and inconsistent values reported by system is a warning sign of bad power supply or/and caps.

I would not rule other things out though.

While changing everything you mention might fix your problem, doing all of it at once will not show you where the issue was and that leaves niggling thoughts in my head usually when I don't know what the issue really was.

What actual attributes are you using to say the other parts you are replacing with are more stable... "Next week I'm changing the psu, motherboard and ram with much better and stable ones"

IMHO lots of people use these terms for parts very willy nilly (not saying you are though, I am genuinely curious)

cheers

I've tested the motherboard and has problems with RAM slots. (memtest on separated PCs). The PSU is not HQ and I'll change that to a Corsair TX750. One Corsair stick was bad so I'll have to get another kit.

My current PC:
AMD Phenom II X4 945
NVIDIA 460 GTX 1GB (Palit)
Asrock 880GXH/USB3
3xHDDs
Spire Jewel Black 650W
2x2GB Corsair DDR3
No overclocks.

@ionescu.liviu,

I don't have time for a full discussion, so here are a few points in reply to your new information. From your questions, I suspect that you think there is a way to be sure of a disk drive's health, but things are not actually so easy.


That seems to be a mis-interpretation by Active Hard Disk Monitor of the Raw Read Error Rate & Seek Error Rate attribute values. Note that the health number from that software is unofficial and is a guess based on the interpretations of that software. As has been discussed before (and over on the Seagate forums), these specific SMART attributes can be difficult to interpret correctly. Notice that the same software is reporting a similar "health" number for your Maxtor drive, due to the same reason.


I'm not going to discuss PC troubleshooting, as that is off-topic for this forum.


Your comments here are confusing, as originally your screenshot showed a Samsung drive; now you are including SMART data from a Maxtor and a WD, but no Samsung drive. Anyway, I see no obvious major problems with those drives (see above for a comment about the likely mis-interpretation by Active Hard Disk Monitor for the Maxtor drive) - there have been a few command timeouts, but until the rest of the PC is known to be OK, these may not be due to drive problems.


Impossible to answer, without you supplying the SMART data at the time when Active Hard Disk Monitor showed that status.


Actually I believe that this software does not properly understand how to interpret some Seagate (and Maxtor) SMART attributes. This is a known problem with that software - it tries to be helpful by trying to guess how to interpret SMART attribute values, but does not always do this correctly.


All hard disks are always "in danger" and could fail at any time, without warning! The specific warnings from that software are likely false positives, but if you want to believe that software then that is your choice.


This is a more complex question than you know, as there are different types of drive power-down. However in short, right now I do not see obvious signs that the drives have been significantly affected. Obviously, you need to get your PC fixed, because in the long-term, repeated power-downs do have risks.


It depends how good you are at interpreting the results of any test. As I tried to explain before, this is not a simple question, even though inexperienced people often think that there should be a simple answer. Drives can fail (or start to fail) in several different ways. For example, as we see here, interpreting the SMART data from a drive which has not yet reported a Threshold Exceeded event, requires opinion based on previous experience which you don't have, and the dubious opinion from Active Hard Disk Pro on Seagate/Maxtor drives is not helpful IMHO.

If you want a "simple" answer, try HDDScan but again, it takes time and experience to interpret the results, for anything except an obviously faulty drive. You may also want to read the Wikipedia page on S.M.A.R.T. itself. Other readers may give you further suggestions, but for now I have run out of time!

@Vulcan

Thank you for your time in answering my questions. I will test my PC after upgrading and see if I can "capture" those critical states. Thank you again.

You're welcome and good luck

The following article is my attempt to understand Seagate's counterintuitive SMART attributes:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Se ... R_HEC.html

The Maxtor drive has an abnormally high Seek Error Rate, but it doesn't appear to have ever fallen below the threshold value of 30.

At the moment it has recorded 156 (= 0x9C) seek errors in 1137580 (= 0x115BAC) seeks.

BTW, are your HDDs mounted vertically?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.